December 2022 Archives

Dear America,

This time last year I thought that the whole "stop the steal" canard would have wilted and died and that Donald Trump would be just a bad memory by now, but I was too optimistic about the sagacity of the American electorate...at least the segment of it that applauded when Trump said he was going to run again in 2024.  I should have known better.  The odious basic nature of that minority of our polity that subscribes to "Trumpism," that loosed horde of Philistines, will never go away I now believe.  They are a monstrous secret that we kept for centuries until Trump came and gave them a bizarre kind of legitimacy.  Among those who harbored those ineffable sentiments that Trump articulates, there is now a bare-faced, prideful claim of verity for ideas that no one would have admitted to harboring just five years ago unless he or she was wearing a sheet or was declaiming white power at a klavern meeting.  Simultaneously the more understated, ostensibly tame bias against minorities, immigrants and the poor and a dangerously sub rosa disdain for Jews get worn on conservative sleeves like camouflaged swastika armbands.  Much to the chagrin of the majority of us who believe in the nation that we have convinced ourselves our founding fathers envisioned for us, that democracy seems imperiled and perhaps even doomed.  We forget that Washington and Jefferson unabashedly and unapologetically owned other human beings, and that if you read The Federalist papers, even Hamilton openly displayed a belief in a plutocratic oligarchy more than in a pure democracy, and now those chickens have come home to roost. America has regressed two hundred fifty years, and we will now have to re-evolve if we are to regain our national civility.

Mind you, the 2022 mid-term elections were a ray of hope.  At a time when it could reasonably have been expected that the 2020 prevailing party would be repudiated at the polls, the Democratic Party actually gained a seat in The Senate (at least until a self-serving senator from Arizona took it back) while losing but a few seats in The House.  It was a moral victory that should hearten the civilized among us.  And I do feel a modicum of relief, but with the potential ascendancy of an embodiment of amorality and self-interest like Kevin McCarthy to the speakership of The House and the likely persistence of a nakedly hypocritical minority leader, Mitch McConnell, in The Senate, the prospect of anything good happening between now and 2024 is impeded if not interdicted.  The Republicans will prevaricate with elliptical references to the legislative attempts of the Democrats to actually do something for the majority of Americans, and the Democrats will flail about claiming that they are not being candid about Republican, conservative deviant tactics out of nobility, losing ground with every moral pat on their own backs.  So 2024 is still hanging over our collective heads like the sword of Damocles.  Will no one rid us of these troublesome apostates of modern democracy?

Don't get me wrong.  I am not calling on some cadre of misguided knights like Henry II did.  The only way to change our fate is with our ballots.  Albeit, Donald Trump would disagree as would the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, a couple of street gangs claiming to be militias and patriots, not understanding that waving a flag does not legitimate insurrection and threats of murder as they commit mayhem.  In order for what has been deemed to be good by consensus in America for more than a hundred years to be reclaimed, we must exercise the rights indigenous to that goodness...among them our rights to vote and speak up...with ardor and diligence.  We must organize not in militias but in political entities that get out the vote and facilitate it when disingenuous legislation permits, and even when it doesn't.  We have to use the process that no one can deny is legitimate, and use it effectively to thwart those who would send us back to the Jim Crow era.  We must "rage, rage against the dying of the light."

I know.  All that's very melodramatic, but someone has to motivate those of us who have retained faith in the possibility that a country like the one we almost had before Trump can  reemerge.  We have to concentrate and persevere.  If there's anything our history as a nation has demonstrated it is that we can do it.  We just have to set our minds to it.  Have a happy holiday and new year.  You can do it.  I'll talk to you next year.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I am pessimistic about our future as a democracy.  I am also pessimistic about the prospect for domestic tranquility in America.  The worst aspect of my pessimism is that I cannot see any way to avert what seems to me to be an imminent armed conflict within our nation, such that I am pondering getting a fire arm myself.  I am a pacifist of over fifty years, but I am still contemplating arming myself so as to protect my household against the advent of what I can see no way to avert.  I refuse to allow our political right wing to dictate to me what I have to believe by ceding to them the right to define American patriotism and freedom.  Even though they have arrogated to themselves the exclusive right to the use of such words and phrases, they have no idea what they mean, nor do they understand what they originally meant to our founding fathers.  What started out as the Trump cult of personality has now become a leaderless mob, and they will run rampant before we can come to some kind of consensus on what to do about them.  And what began as a Trump bestowed license for certain Americans to lapse into being their worst selves has become a kind of sanctimony that looks a lot like the German ethos of the 1920's and 1930's.  We are on the edge of an abyss, and a significant segment of our polity is peering over the edge and preparing to jump in.

I should concede that the 2022 mid-terms were a ray of hope in that many of the Trumpers who ran for office under the Trump aegis lost, and the Arizona election deniers who had who-knows-what in mind as they supervised the vote count in Cochise County are on the brink of indictment for their pretextual effort to squelch the vote in their jurisdiction.  Of course the rhetoric continues unabated, but the results seem to now be cast in stone.  While the Republicans did win the few representatives they needed to resume control of the House of Representatives, they didn't gain any senators, and may in fact lose one seat in that body.  We'll see tomorrow when the runoff between incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock and his unqualified opponent, Hershel Walker, takes place.  That may be another ray of hope.  But even with these glints of the endurance of our democracy, there is reason for despair.  I'm talking about the persistence of a kind of ipse dixit conservative narrative opining that only conservatism is valid.  Maureen Dowd runs a column written by her rabid conservative brother every year, apparently assuaging some kind of self-doubt about her intellectual honesty.  He, like other conservatives including Ross Douthat, who's regular column often appears on the same page as Dowd's in the opinion section of the New York Times, this year posited some Trump favored positions as if they were axiomatic.  For example, he attributed inflation to the Democrats and President Joe Biden, ignoring the fact that our inflation is abating while it continues to be rampant in Great Britain and the Euro Zone, which I don't need to tell you neither Biden nor the Democrats have any control.  He pilloried Biden for his economic policies, including the legislation that funded the living expenses and rent of millions of unemployed Americans during the pandemic, keeping roofs over their heads and food on their tables because that is the party line.  Douthat tends to quote progressive commentators and attribute their ideas to the entirety of the progressive movement as if it is univocal when all one has to do is listen to Bernie Sanders once to know that we don't all think alike, and Dowd's brother's polemics are cut from the same cloth.

At any rate, the next hurtle is the 2024 Republican primary season in which Trump will try to resurrect his now faltering popularity in opposition to saner voices, even among the Republicans.  It is true that the poltroons in the Republican leadership are still kowtowing at Trump's erstwhile throne, but we can hope that two years of other candidates deprecating the former miscreant-in-chief and gaining the credence and moral fealty of the Republicans of an earlier time will be enough to thwart Trump.  He will have a tough time proving that the Republican primaries are rigged and simultaneously garnering the support of a plurality of the party's voters.  And besides, Trump lost two popular elections, the second by three times what he lost the first one by.  If he gets the party nod, it will probably be worse next time, which can only redound to the benefit of Democrats and independent thinkers everywhere.

In the final analysis, there is actually light at the end of the tunnel.  Trump's peccancy and amorality are clearly defined in the light of the past two elections and the legal woes that we can only hope hoist him by his own petard.  We could get lucky and see him in prison by 2024, rendering all my hand wringing moot.  But I'm not counting on it.  Even though the judges he appointed seem to have the integrity that Trump lacks, I won't breathe a sigh of relief until he is wearing stripes, and I don't mean pin stripes.

Your friend,

Mike

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This page is an archive of entries from December 2022 listed from newest to oldest.

November 2022 is the previous archive.

January 2023 is the next archive.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.